Hello everybody,

Apologies for what seems like a gaping long silence, given the volume of the discussion. I was offline (British Library) for a couple of days and was amazed to see the speed at which the discussions here are developing.

We now just have to hope the public forum takes off as well. I really hope to ‘hear’ some voices in there.

Thank you John and Douglas for great personal histories of the tape movement. This is really valuable, from my perspective for one, as the only tape experiments I was doing at the time involved a taping the ‘Hit Of The Month’ from Yugoslav TV by standing in front of the TV with a mic pointed towards it, while singing along. (Come to think of it – those would probably sound pretty interesting now in a grim sort of way).

It is also really useful to hear accounts of broadcast networks and Doug’s thoughts about democratic (or lack of) media in different countries he’s lived in. This is something I think we should return to at some point – the differences in local situations and what the internet/radio etc represent in different contexts (on that note – I just have to mention London’s recent addition to the airwaves (and online) - Resonance.fm - which in my view transformed our airwaves beyond recognition).

In an attempt to draw out a few potential conversational threads (in no particular order):

1. MUSEUM ENGEGEMENT WITH SOUND ONLINE VS OFFLINE:

I am interested in picking up the discussion around the museum’s offline and online engagement with sound works that Kenneth started:

It strikes me as unlikely that large institutions such as the Tate or MoMA will (at least not in the near future) begin to offer a truly dynamic (read: worth visiting regularly) online environment, whether we are talking about mp3 archives, a live stream or other forms of support for the ‘arts of sound’ (as Doug put it). I actually think it would be crazy for a mammoth museum like the Tate to even attempt to be at the centre of online activity - I think that would be unrealistic and unlikely to succeed.

I say this partly due to the bureaucratic nature of large museums that I’m sure we’re all familiar with, but also because I just don’t think its ever going to be high up enough on the list of museum priorities. And my question is - should it be?

I feel like a similar discussion used to (and probably still does) exist about net art: should museums deal with it and if so how (remember when a few years back every art centre used to try to commission a net art piece).Various initiatives were started but to be honest - museum sites are the last place I’d go in search of net art.

So I don’t really find it that interesting to think about whether a museum uploads an MP3 of an installation or performance quickly or if it takes them a year to get it on their site, what I find really crucial is whether that museum is engaging with the longer term implications of where that work ends up - in the public domain or not. What I interesting is that museums are now beginning to implement Creative Commons Licences, for example. That to me is something that shows a change in the right direction. Something much more important than whether the website happens to be a ‘hub of’ activity at any particular moment.

Also: JOHN: you mentioned your expectations of a gallery visit and announced that you will talk about ‘how little the gallery environment benefits from sound works and vice versa. I’m interested to hear some more about this.

Do you really believe that sound works do not need the gallery at all? Kenneth and Doug, do you agree with this view?

2. ARTS INSTITUTIONS PAIRING UP WITH INDEPENDENT NETWORKS - DOES IT WORK?

Another thread I think is worth discussing is the model Doug proposed whereby existing networks (such as UbuWeb for example) might pair up with institutions such as the Tate or MoMA.

One model that I know of (and am curious about) is Rhizome’s recent ‘deal’ with the New Museum. Does anyone know more about this? It strikes me (from the outside) as a good initiative but perhaps someone closer (Kenneth – geographically closer?) knows more?

One very recent example of a partnership that I have first hand experience of is Christian Marclay’s Sounds Of Christmas (which took place at Tate Modern in December, which Kenneth mentioned (I’m glad got brought up already ). This is actually an example of a museum happily partnering up with the ‘smaller guys’ – a good model in my opinion. Sounds Of Christmas was co-produced by Electra (the agency I run) and I actually think it was a rare example of a museum showing incredible openness and flexibility and above all offering financial support and ability to act quickly. In this case the museum listened to the ‘small guy’ - by allowing us to do what we do best - ie act quickly, get stuff done organically without having to get caught in the bureaucratic machinery. (By the way – I had no idea the performance MP3s were already on the website?). I think this is a positive step and something I hope we’ll see some more of in the future.

3. IF IT DOESN'T EXIST ON THE INTERNET IT DOESN'T EXIST.

Just briefly: I thought this was a brilliant way of putting something that I for one keep trying to work out for myself. The funny thing is that in principle I totally agree with you Kenneth about it being alive only once it’s online, but in practice I turned away from curating ‘online art’ out of sheer frustration with the lack of real spaces, people and face to face discussion (the point Doug makes) and now I’m very happy operating in real galleries and concert spaces again...so I’ll have to mull that one over some more…

And on that note...off I go back to the offline world of the BL filled with good ol’ books!

Hello there – I am not going to but into this conversation very much. As the Curator of the season, my role is more tied into making a space for the debate, producing resources, negotiating with the artists and interfacing the content in a meaningful way for audiences – providing narrative and visibility. Though on the topic of ‘sound at Tate’ I thought I would make a few clarifications.

Lina writes:
"I actually think it would be crazy for a mammoth museum like the Tate to even attempt to be at the centre of online activity - I think that would be unrealistic and unlikely to succeed. I say this partly due to the bureaucratic nature of large museums that I’m sure we’re all familiar with, but also because I just don’t think it’s ever going to be high up enough on the list of museum priorities. And my question is - should it be?"

I think you are right about it never being an overriding priority in a traditional museum environment, at least not in the immediate future. However as I have engaged with these issues from a number of angles through my position at Tate and in dialogue with other colleagues. It does appear to me, that the opportunity we have, as a non profiteering, public sector organization (outside of the record label/net label/and big money music and film industries) is to work in close collaboration with artists and legal advisors to trial and present some models, which enable the public sector to grow more confidence in this area. Whilst allowing artists to engage with how it may relate to their work and practice/or not… and to do this in a non-exploitative fashion in context of an open debate and educational objectives. It can only ever be a contribution to the whole, and certainly, one would hope – not definitive.

Lina writes:
"So I don’t really find it that interesting to think about whether a museum uploads an MP3 of an installation or performance…"

And on the same topic John writes:
"… the networked dissemination of sound files is something which, as you point out, others do quite well, so it really doesn't make much difference if the Tate or MOMA make the effort to distribute sound files or not."

As a Curator, I do somewhat agree with John... in that I am really not sure that recording and squashing a beautifully spatial and architectural sound work into an MP3 (or heaven forbid – a ring tone) adds much value to the work itself, and barely sounds like a useful innovation, in most contexts. However I think the nature of some work/practice (not all) can find value in these types of distributions. Given the nature of the Online Events programme that I am responsible for, it’s audience, distribution and durational format (i.e. it often precedes and always postscripts associated live events) I have been looking for ways (and projects) which are specifically appropriate to finding opportunity and extended value in this context.

I will give a little background and further preview information with regard to the MP3s that are associated with the d_cultuRe season to illustrate my point...

SoundSurface by Scanner and Stephen Vitiello
These artists began negotiating with me about how they wanted to be represented in the archive. I had approached them with a mind to do something particular to the work they were doing, instead of your typical live webcast of a talk. The result grew organically out of these discussions and triggered the research, which further lead to this follow on season and debate. This is not a straight recording of a performance put into Mp3 format for the sake of it. The artists were commissioned to post-produce a recording of their performance and create a unique digital object specifically for online archive, which continued to engage with the themes and structures that arose from the live event – in response to the Donald Judd exhibition at Tate Modern. Mp3 came up as an appropriate format (over real media) – which lead to all kinds of issues around downloadable content and copyright, which we resolved with a Creative Commons license. The artists and I were interviewed by Mark Mclaren for a resonance.fm show on some of the issues and the process of arriving at the piece. You can listen to an archive of that interview here www.archive.org/details/sijis

Lina writes:
"(By the way – I had no idea the performance MP3s were already on the website?). I think this is a positive step and something I hope we’ll see some more of in the future."

The Sounds of Christmas by Christian Marclay
www2.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/sounds_of_christmas.shtm
Christian is still getting around to listening to it/them so we can continue a dialogue about how best to represent the work and also decide on the appropriate rights framework. I am happy to allow the right amount of time for artists to make considered and creative decisions about these kinds of things. Rest assured it will not just be a straight recording of the entire performance squashed into an mp3 -- they may well be short samples, reflecting the sampling structure of the actual performance. It will be posted at some point during the discussion.

The Sound of Heaven and Earth (Luc Ferrari, Kaffe Matthews, David Grubbs, Achim Wollscheid, Eric
This live event took place at Tate Modern last Saturday. We have recorded and negotiated rights as appropriate with each composer and musician, in order to release mp3s under creative commons of the compositional scores (which were constructed of pure audio) along side real media archives (all rights reserved) of the performances, and some of the rehearsal/instruction process between the composers and musicians. Each composition will be represented differently depending on the nature of the individual work and the composer’s wishes. As, on the evening itself the scores were not to be heard – just the interpretations of those scores in performance, I recognized early on with this project that the truly interesting thing to archive in this context, was the practice and compositional technique, this is rare content, and as far as I am concerned, in juxtaposition to the performance, of great educational value -- beyond mere documentation or a webcast of the event. Working with the composers and musicians on the day was truly fascinating and I am very pleased to be able to offer some insight into that to those who were not involved in the process. Again I am attempting to take the nature of the medium and format into consideration. It seemed appropriate that the scores themselves were available for people to download, reuse and reinterpret – that is the job of a score. The performance recordings are there to demonstrate an example interpretation. These will also be released next month.

Kenneth writes:
"... but they're buried deep and I had a lot of trouble finding them. Which brings up another point: What is the difference between the Nauman exhibition and the Marclay performance?"

I do take your point Kenny – I ask myself the same question sometimes, however I should point out that things are highly profiled on the Tate site when they are current. Unfortunately, actually once the Nauman show slips into past exhibitions on the site it will also be buried deep. Tate are aware of this as an issue across all content on the site and it is something that is being addressed separate to the other issues discussed here.

I agree with John that the well-being of certain types of work doesn’t require institutions like the Tate to take up their cause; yet there are other types of work that would benefit. So it’s good that major museums and galleries are now attending to works involving sound in a more concerted manner. There has been a patchy history of such exhibitions, mostly little synchronic slices of who’s doing what. Some of the exhibitions I’ve seen around the world demonstrate that there’s still a steep learning curve on simple matters of presentation. There was a major sound art show at in Sydney that self-destructed because the institution didn’t know how to handle a number of sound works in close proximity to one another, due mainly to a curator in a land grab for glory who alienated the community of sound artists who could have lent their collective wisdom on the matter. ZKM in Karlsruhe is one major institution that does things right in terms of exhibition design, no doubt because the media arts are noisy by nature and don’t come from such solemn stock.

There is still a need for a more systematically historical approach. The secular prayer that is the hushed space of the gallery needs to be interrupted by the sound of history being brushed against the grain, in Walter Benjamin's words. The Centre Pompidou’s recent exhibition was a step in the right direction, although it was obviously constrained (enabled?) and certainly informed by its own collection. Now that sound is hip, the danger is that certain blue-chip artists, already housed in major collections, will be elevated to unmerited positions of historical importance with respect to the use of sound, and the role of artists responsible to a greater extent for the genesis of sound as an artistic medium will be diminished or excluded. I’m not sure what shows the Tate has done in the past that involve a heavy dose of sound, but the Nauman show has certainly been trumpeted in this way. Nauman has done very interesting works involving sound and especially perception relating to sound (see the last part of my essay for the Pompidou exhibition catalog), but if indeed this show is the first such show for the Tate, what are the economic and proprietary mechanisms of its genesis? There are of course a number of blue-chip gallery artists orbiting Nauman’s generation not known primarily for a concentration in sound, who have done wonderful work in the area—Dennis Oppenheim, John Baldessari, Rebecca Horn, Vito Acconci and Gary Hill come immediately to mind—but I really hope such people don’t exhaust the curatorial imagination of major institutions.

Lina sez:
"I actually think it would be crazy for a mammoth museum like the Tate to even attempt to be at the centre of online activity - I think that would be unrealistic and unlikely to succeed."

I disagree. Places like the Tate and MoMA are obliged in the interest of public education to share from their vast holdings that which has significant historical interest, insignificant commercial value, and travels well in other mediums. Sound art -- or at least artist's recordings -- fit all thee criteria. and I can't buy the idea that it's for a lack of resources: we all know how easy it is to digitally convert and post MP3s.

Lina sez:
"I feel like a similar discussion used to (and probably still does) exist about net art: should museums deal with it and if so how (remember when a few years back every art centre used to try to commission a net art piece).Various initiatives were started but to be honest - museum sites are the last place I’d go in search of net art."

I agree. Why go somewhere in physical space to see something that is better viewed in the comfort of your own home?

The social and political ramifications of the online environment as radical distributive mechanism are immense. I live in New York City; in ten minutes, I can see all the art I want. Most people don't have this privilege. For them, it's nearly impossible to get to a museum. In fact, for the majority of people interested in art, the web is their main source of information and exposure. In the interest of education, again, the museums, I feel, are obliged to share their wealth.

Lina D writes:
'Also: JOHN: you mentioned your expectations of a gallery visit and announced that you will talk about ‘how little the gallery environment benefits from sound works and vice versa. I’m interested to hear some more about this.'

Yes i did say that Lina [hi, welcome to our chat], but i don't think i should have said that. I could argue with myself here, by prescribing any number of beneficial situations to embellish or transform "the secular prayer that is the hushed space of the gallery" as Doug so nicely paraphrased Benjamin.
I could also complain (as i often do to myself ) about most of the attempts to add sound to gallery situations. These interruptions and maskings of "hushed space", include nattering video monitors, most sound sculptures, and the pervasive ventilation noise that is often a given in contemporary galleries.
Through the '80's and '90's i successfully declined numerous invitations to contribute work to group shows of what at the time was usually called Sound Sculpture. These group exhibits inevitably impressed me as being sonic ghettos, with individual pieces fighting to be heard over or under each other, and unhappy staff fighting to turn down or off the volume of the more persistent objects being exhibited.
In 2000 i ended up contributing to the Hayward Gallery's Sonic Boom, which was a exhibition of this sort, by accident. When curator David Toop asked me to contribute to a show of art by musicians, and mentioned a couple of the people involved, i imagined that there would be album-cover collages by Christian Marclay, sideways video images by Brian Eno, and maybe paintings or photos by some hip Ron Wood or Bryan Adams. David knew that i had always designed my own album covers and i assumed, rather narrow-mindedly, that 'art by musicians' in an art gallery would be visual. This i thought was my first invitation to be in a visual show. I eagerly contributed a time-based image i was working on, called Janéad O'Jakriel, a plasma-screen moving still chronoplunderphotic electron drawing, as i variously called it.
Shortly before i took off for London David clarified the nature of the show (i.e., it was a sound sculpture show) and implored me to add a sonic component to my perfectly mute piece. I reluctantly drummed up a separate but related audio work called Jackoscan.
Sonic Boom did seem like a big noisy sonic ghetto, which nonetheless contained some very lovely neighbourhoods of sounds in often incongruous juxtapositions. The more delicate pieces, Max Eastley's for instance, were impossible to listen to without hearing a more noisy neighbour at the same time. This was partly because the exhibition's architect (or, more precisely, interior designer) Christophe Gérard (who i should thank for conjuring up a very nice plinth for my piece) insisted that none of the exhibits would be behind a closed door. This rule had a compromising effect on several works. My neighbour-once-removed, Christian Marclay, and his Guitar Drag, was an example. The piece, which is not really in any sense an installation, but rather a wonderful traditional narrative movie, had a room to itself; a room without a door. The subject matter of Guitar Drag cried out for it to be real loud: something obnoxiously loud to some spectators would have been ideal. And it could have been much louder with a door in place, with occasional gusts of sound when someone entered or exited. But as it was, Christian either had to settle for a wimpy level, or completely drown out the Project Dark piece in the neighbouring plot.
Adapting work to the Sonic Boom show was a bit like living in a cheaply constructed hotel or apartment building and trying to get along with your neighbours who could be so easily overheard through thin walls. I do think that the organizers did a good job of distributing pieces throughout the building - perhaps the biggest advantage of that exhibit was devoting the whole building emphatically to sound. The overall environment was free to be noisy.
I personally tend to appreciate noisy places in very small doses. But, to complete my plasma image, i ended up spending long days in that environment. At first this felt uncomfortably like working in a factory full of assembly-line machinery. The same sounds would again and again recur. But during the week i was committed to that location, there was a most satisfying transformation in my mood. I began to notice that when i walked into the place in the morning i'd appreciate what a wonderfully complex melange of sound it was, and like a pop record heard several times, i grew to love it, though i continued to prefer that my contribution be mute (Lee Renaldo also had a sculpture which didn't make sound, more along the lines of what i first thought the exhibition was to be).

A week after Sonic Boom opened i was in Vienna putting up a big sound and video installation, a collaboration with designer Bruce Mau called Stress (not to be confused with Stress 2002, for which i did not participate).
The location was the annex of the MAK (museum of design) which was a building about the size of the Hayward. The big difference was, instead of having a shared acoustical space for a variety of divergent works, the MAK building was devoted to one piece. Which meant that our piece could be and was (occasionally) extremely loud - ca. 120 decibels - the institution consulted their stress engineers to determine if it was OK for us to literally shake the building. There were also very quiet bits and, because i had designed localized elements into the custom sound system : depending where you were, you could hear quiet things while loud things were happening overall.
The only other place this piece ran in this state was in an abandoned air hanger.
I don't think this degree of loudness which is common in places like clubs will ever be a part of an art exhibit in anything other than a dedicated space.

I'm trying to think of an analogy for loudness in the visual art world - the colours in painting being too bright? Even if you are dealing with pure light, an extremely bright (id wish, as with sound that the levels, that this would be below the threshold of pain) light work could be contained and localized in some way as to co-exist with other work, but sound is much more difficult to contain.
Another analogy for loudness could be bigness. The Tate Modern is designed to compliment really big sculptures (like Louise Bourgeois's Maman) but imagine if they hosted the acoustic equivalent; something that dominated the main hall.

The opposite of loudness, quiet (and something close to its absolute state, silence), is easier to reconcile with the multi-purpose functions of museums (Bruce Nauman's Acoustic Pressure Piece, which i found at the Sons & Lumières exhibit at Centre Pompidou, is a very poorly designed attempt at this).
The only piece i ever made specifically in response to a sound sculpture installation was the only piece in my solo show at the Obscure Gallery in Quebec in 1992. It featured both an absolute negation of light and a gradual entry into very near silence.
Thinking about it reminds me that i should shut up for now.

As a background question for this panel: how does the art world embrace collectivity and collaboration in general? (The art world here is the one where the bulk of the institutions and markets reside and where the bulk of the discourses are generated, those major metropolitan zones where wealth, patrons and collectors are concentrated. We have to get detailed because those in the thick of it have been known to confuse cosmopolis for cosmos.) Here we are at the Tate, after all, discursively embracing various collective and collaborative practices. Has there been or will there be more than a discursive embrace?

Tracking back internet audio to cassette culture has the effect of moving us closer to mail art. Although I participated on the margins of mail art, I’m a bit fuzzy how it arose in the first place. I do know that File Magazine played an important part (then Vile) and that Canadian artists were key (I’m not sure this works, but being from the Pacific Northwest and going to drink beer and tomato juice across the border when I was 18, I’m damn near Canadian myself). I’m imagining (what a historian who hasn’t done the legwork does) one reason is Canada’s already-distributed character, starting with itself and then moving with momentum to the rest of the world. For an example of how cassette culture came out of mail art, see Rod Summers article VEC AUDIO EXCHANGE in Sound by Artists, edited by Dan Lander and Micah Lexier.

The book itself is a case in point. If there was an emblematic Anglophone starting point for sound/audio/radio art in the early-1990s (fueled by the growing activity in the 1980s), then that book is it. And it grew from the ground of distributed-Canada, from Art Metropole, Banff Centre, Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, Western Front, etc. It’s similar to other distributed and diasporic cultural and political collaborations and transmissions (Hmong cassette culture, Australian Aboriginal ham radio, the fax in the first Intifada), the outreaches of communication that centers of power need not confront and thus lose an opportunity for resourcefulness, invention and distant generation of new perspectives.

Again, I lose the scent with Mail Art, but I do know that there were similar strategies with Fluxus and Intermedia. George Brecht’s event-score cards were distributed through the mail, as were similar works by a number of other artists. There were numerous pieces where collaboration was distributed in exquisite-corpse-like chain or centrally and gently directed. The practice becomes explicitly global in a piece like Mieko Shiomi’s wonderful Spatial Poem. It’s interesting that Fluxus commanded little respect from official art world galleries and museums until collectors and institutions had assured a sufficient market, and only then when Maciunas had been constructed as the dead anti-art czar leaving a trail of Tiffany eggs. Look how long Fluxus took to break into official art world discourse in New York. I believe Liz Kotz’s article in October was the first to broach the topic, and that appeared just a few years ago. October had been delectating over conceptual art for years, despite the fact that many of the ideas informing conceptual art had previously arisen in Fluxus and Intermedia, and in an often more interesting way.

So, to bring this back to an improbable loop, I doubt that Robin James will die in the manner of Maciunas in order to shoehorn Cassette Mythos or Op Magazine into the museum. Also, just a little detail work, the paraphrase of Benjamin was the brushing history against the grain, not the secular prayer: that came from a poll long ago where people compared their experience in art galleries and museums first and foremost to church.

Doug says: As a background question for this panel: how does the art world embrace collectivity and collaboration in general?

I actually do believe that the artworld is very much engaging with the type of work Doug has brought up , but that it’s engagement is with a very different type of collaborative practice to what we are discussing here (works that may be slightly ‘off topic’ to this discussion):

For instance – the artworld has embraced works by artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija (whose dinners are known to list ‘lots of people’ as one of the materials used in the work), and the work of Tino Seghal which is based on a set of instructions executed by a group of individuals that he refers to as ‘interpreters’ (see the current show at London’s ICA).

At last year’s Frieze Art Fair, one of the works purchased by the Tate was Roman Ondak’s piece ‘queue’ which consists of people forming a queue in designated spots, at a specific time.

I’m seeing a lot of work in this vein at the moment, which is very much embraced by the artworld, but I am not so sure it is truly collaborative work. I would use the term participation rather then collaboration.

And by the same token: Are Yoko Ono’s Instruction Pieces, Max Neuhaus’s ‘Public Supply’ or Mieko Shiomi’s ‘Spatial Poem’ truly collaborative works, or are single author’s works which are realized only through participation?

So my question is: is there a difference between collaboration and participation in what we are talking about, and if so, what is it?

I would argue that we are talking about works clearly authored by Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi, Max Neuhaus, Rikrit Tiravanija and other artists mentioned above, which are executed with the participation of a certain community.

So I’m just wondering whether in these discussions (and much of current debates around this topic) the terms ‘collaboration’ and ‘participation’ might sometimes get used to mean one and the same thing, when in fact they are very different.

Also – I think because some of the work we are talking about here tends to be ephemeral (such as the aforementioned queue), and ‘set in motion’ by a community of people, issues of authorship and ways of collecting get raised in discussions around institutional engagement, but I am not sure that collaboration is at the heart of what we’re trying to get to.

So, for the sake of what I’m finding to be a truly inspiring discussion - what are some examples of works that could be termed truly collaborative that we can use to examine institutional engagement?

Sorry if these examples may seem slightly ‘off topic’ but I find it difficult to talk exclusively about sound work when we are surrounded by so much practice that (I feel) we need to reference when talking about collaboration and the artworld.

Lina makes a good point about collaboration and participation. It seems that what is meant by “community” and the nature of their contribution can put things into a grey zone. Shiomi's Spatial Poem is certainly participation. The nature of their input is so simple, a snapshot of the quotidian, that authorship on their part really doesn't count, if collaboration entails contributing authorships. But it's participation among fairly close circles of friends, a community largely of other practitioners, and the work itself is an expression and vitalization of that community. Other participatory pieces could entail the input what would otherwise be an audience. Furthermore, in a Flluxus context “authorship” most often lacks the control with which it is usually associated and could instead be thought of as a means of creating occasions and opportunities. Shiomi frames the occasion, but the beauty is in its service of self-representation to a distributed community. I think that this is really not off-topic, but might help us get at a notion of social projects for varying types of communities, and a healthy confusion between collaboration and participation. For instance, how do we start talking about Negativland’s long running Over the Edge show on KPFA radio in Berkeley, where people’s contributions made over the phone are mixed real-time with onsite studio-generated materials and broadcast. OTE was a model for a type of collaboration/participation that moved onto the internet, but different than The Hub (Chris Brown, John Bischoff, Tim Perkis, Scott Gresham-Lancaster, Mark Trayle, Phil Stone…). Come to think of it, other models of participation/collaboration within music groups and within the act of mixing itself mixes things up even more.

I think Lina answers her own question clearly enough : all the examples she mentions are singular artists who ask others to participate. I only use the term 'collaboration' in situations where there is equal responsibility and authorship.

An established example of this in the viz-art world would be General Idea (a collaborative entity who's identity remains intact even though there is only one member still living). An example in the sound world would be any slightly democratic band, although examples of bands who share authorship are rare.

Perhaps someone will disagree with this statement : there is nothing intrinsically more collaborative or participatory about sound-artistic endeavours in comparison with visual-artistic or conceptual endeavours.

But there is a traditional hierarchy in most disciplines, and even in the musical realm the person in charge is seldom the person who is creating the sounds. For instance it's more common than not in contemporary opera to banish the composer from any decision making in a production of the work.

The Stress installation i described above was an example of an exhibiting body imposing a hierarchy on what was explicitly a collaborative working situation. The MAK had been informed that the work was a three-way equal collaboration (this was contractually stated, and it is something i insist upon. The actual working arrangement was a bit more complicated - André Lepecki co-initiated the project but was not active in the design or realization of the installation; and because Bruce Mau was paying for my participation i tended to think of him as my boss in order to have give him the deciding vote should we ever have reached an impasse, but that didn't happen). The MAK chose to interpret this relationship differently, so when we arrived in Vienna all the display advertising said 'STRESS by Bruce Mau and André Lepecki, [and then in smaller print] sound design by John Oswald'. This is not what we had told them and its quite clearly contrary to my conception of a collaborative endeavour, where even though the collaborators may each have a particular expertise, everyone is free to participate in all aspects of the project, rather than resorting to a departmental approach. In a sense, we are all directors.

I mention this because this is another example of the usual sensory hierarchy (brain-space-demanding visuals come in the front, sounds come in the side doors, often unnoticed) manifested in how art-making is described.

As I'm fated to be the net-guy, I'd like to consider collaboration in terms of file-sharing. In thinking about the way that UbuWeb (and many other types of file sharing systems) distribute their warez, I've come up with a term: "nude media." What I mean by this is that once, say, an MP3 file is downloaded from the context of a site such as UbuWeb, it's free or naked, stripped bare of the normative external signifiers that tend to give as much meaning to an artwork as the contents of the artwork itself. Unadorned with branding or scholarly liner notes, emanating from no authoritative source, these objects are nude, not clothed. Thrown into open peer-to-peer distribution systems, nude media files often lose even their historical significance and blur into free-floating sound works, traveling in circles that they would not normally reach if clad in their conventional clothing. (iTunes delivers their files somewhat nude: your dollar doesn't get you a cover or any liner notes. In addition, they use the proprietary AAF file format and the ID3 tags are chock-full of ownership).

Believers in the inherent stability of media, regardless of its form, might argue that this phenomenon leads to little more than a tangle of disinformation. But recontextualization has been the basis for innumerable radical works of art. With the advent of file-sharing we've seen this approach explode. On UbuWeb, although we encode our MP3s with the ID3 tags -- which, on the MP3 player, identify the artist, the title of the cut, etc. -- we do not encode provenance information, such as "Courtesy of UbuWeb." Unlike ITunes, when an MP3 leaves our site it is, in essence, returned to the common space of the web: it leaves nude.

Through a curious confluence of Downtown sensibility and mass marketing, thousands of rock-loving, Lollapalooza-attending Sonic Youth fans bought their "Goodbye 20th Century" disc and were exposed to what until very recently has resided on the fringes of the historical avant-garde. Through gestures like these, the avant-garde becomes hip and well-marketed. Stroll through any good record store or museum gift shop and you'll notice hundreds of artifacts of the historical avant-garde gorgeously repackaged to be snapped up by consumers. As soon as these items are purchased, however they can be recruited as nude media, via peer-to-peer file sharing. In the case of some of this material, what was originally created as an anti-authoritarian gesture has, thanks to the Internet, been restored to its original radical intentions. Due to the manipulative properties of digital media, such artworks are susceptible to remixing and mangling on a mass scale, hence never having the one authoritative version bestowed upon these objects in traditional media. They are ever-changing works-in-progress operating in the most widespread gift economy yet known.

Such circumstances raise many questions: How does having a variety of contexts influence the cultural reception of such objects? Who or what determines an avant-garde artifact's value, both commercially and intellectually? How does this in turn impact the artist's reputation, both commercially and intellectually? If artifacts are always in flux, when is an historical work determined to be "finished"?

The web-based bootlegging phenomenon turns this into an endless giant game of telephone, with MP3s being passed off from one person to the next, remixed each time, a stunning example of collaboration.

If the purpose of this panel is to simultaneously discuss sound and networking, and the politics thereof, then Kenneth “The Fated Net-Guy” Goldsmith has hit the mark with the concept of “nude media” which is “free or naked, stripped bare of the normative external signifiers that tend to give as much meaning to an artwork as the contents of the artwork itself. Unadorned with branding or scholarly liner notes, emanating from no authoritative source, these objects are nude, not clothed. Thrown into open peer-to-peer distribution systems, nude media files often lose even their historical significance and blur into free-floating sound works, traveling in circles that they would not normally reach if clad in their conventional clothing.”

This, of course, not only describes issues pertaining to proprietary rights, discussions which I find often tailspin into loops and mixes signifying not much (given the exchange climate Kenneth describes); it also describes the deracinating operations of conventional musical discourse and practice on the obvious and subtle complexity of sounds.

I can’t tell whether Kenneth valorizes this or not, or whether it’s big like the weather, can’t do much about it short of a Kyoto Accord. On a mass scale surpassing the big weather of file exchange, appropriation is “nude media”, whether it’s historical amnesia, social or ecological decontextualization, lack of attribution, cultural theft and imperialism.

It’s Steven Feld’s “Pygmy Pop” writ large, or the globtrotting shopping trip of Brian Eno and David Byrnes’ “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.” It’s life reduced to exchange with none of those persnickety traces of the labor of others, what every American, at least, learns with every purchase.

John’s Plunderphonics was/is a direct counter to “nude media” in this respect. Its system of attribution is pitted against this class of appropriation. It offers a richness of sound where you don’t have to leave your memory and intellect at the door.

When Kenneth states, “Due to the manipulative properties of digital media, such artworks are susceptible to remixing and mangling on a mass scale, hence never having the one authoritative version bestowed upon these objects in traditional media,” he is repeating Derrida’s early description of what happens to the authoritative presence of speech when it circulates in the contaminating environs of writing.

It doesn’t seem to me that the paltry discourses surrounding most works in this mélange of exchange would qualify as authoritative, and no doubt Kenneth would agree. The remedy is not to get oedipal about a pathetic discourse and jettison it; why not bring gramps along for the ride: there’s room.

The nude media effect isn't applicable to sound. It can be applied to any data. Nonetheless i think most often people prefer to put an identifying handle on every thing; and things lose their handles from laziness, theft or pranksterism. A computer-audio world example of the latter would be downloadable ditties on P2P networks which are different from their identify tags. Both major labels and musicians aspiring to be heard have posted downloads allegedly by famous pop stars; the former to render the network unreliable, and the latter so their relatively unpopular stuff might get heard. The contents of these audio files range from what the major labels would consider undesirable noise to what intrepid artists might consider desirable noise. Sometimes these files contain admonishing spoken messages.

Doug K writes:
"John’s Plunderphonics was/is a direct counter to “nude media” in this respect. Its system of attribution is pitted against this class of appropriation."

Yes. But preceding the plunderphonic publications were Mystery Tapes. I mentioned the distribution scheme for these in an earlier missive. What i didn't mention is that the packaging concept: which was to obfuscate sources as much as possible. Because the tapes were physical objects, they looked like something. They were packaged in a certain way, but the packaging didn't help identify the contents. This sort of contrary appearance is not uncommon in the pop and advertising world.

A response i wrote a number of years ago in reply to that old desert island disc question contains something close to the Mystery Tape philosophy:

What records would i take along to a desert island? If one sacrifices oneself to the process of the journalistic interview, this hypothetical quandary is likely to be presented. I've been asked this question many times. My impulsive and very honest answer is that i would first of all take the records i myself have created, plus one or two of the ones i've produced ( the list is short - Alto Sax, Plunderphonic, Elektrax, Discosphere, Plexure, Grayfolded, Gordon Monahan's This Piano Thing, a couple of Mystery Tapes and Musicworks cassette magazines which i edited [...]. My list is obviously a monument of egotism, but there is also a reasonable argument which makes this selection inevitable. My recorded releases are made entirely to fulfill my own personal listening desires. I've often stated that these recordings were made to fill the most annoying gaps in my record collection. By assuming the stance of the listener in producing these things i can at-the-best-of-times come up with something that i don't hear as my-music but rather as music-exactly-as-i-want-to-listen-to-it. Experience has indicated that these things that i like are also things that others like, which is the reason i will sometimes make more than one copy of a recording.

Missing from the list are almost all of the recordings on which i play live or improvise, including those which i may have produced or edited. In fact, as much as i can rationally justify their existence, i hope that these items will land on some desert island other than the one i'm inhabiting. These recordings give me the same uneasy feeling that most people seem to have listening to tapes of their own speaking voices. The exception to this queasiness is my 1980 solo album Alto Sax which i inexplicably like very much.

There's another angle to my desert island listening desires, which goes back to my pre-teen years; long before i made my first record. At that time i felt there were too many extra-musical influences on my impressionable youthful mind. Record covers revealed either attractive or goofy looking individuals in their most groovy attire; these records were categorized in stores mostly according to the race, gender and musical education of these individuals. Publications that focused on a certain age group or race were full of opinions about the quality or social importance or the timeliness of this music.

I thought that the following solution would provide a more pure and satisfying listening experience: Upon being banished to the hi-fi equipped desert island that i'd been hearing about, i would begin to receive shipments of specially prepared records, sent by an individual or consortium who had a love of a broad variety of music. These records would come in blank jackets and all the information on the disc labels would be whited out. All i would have to go on is what i could hear. It would be in some cases impossible to decipher how old the music was, or what color the musicians were or what they liked to wear. I would subscribe to no music magazines. This would be my ideal desert island listening experience.

Years later i got involved in Mystery Tapes which was an attempt to replicate this idea without having to be exiled, and also Pitch, which are concerts of live and recorded music taking place in absolute darkness, thereby also alleviating appearances from the musical experience. [8/23/98]

Radio, in particular, and internet audio, if the host so chooses, are free of being encumbered by appearances, and therefore more audibly pure.

John sez:
These records would come in blank jackets and all the information on the disc labels would be whited out. All i would have to go on is what i could hear. It would be in some cases impossible to decipher how old the music was, or what color the musicians were or what they liked to wear... This would be my ideal desert island listening experience.

It's strange that John is closely articulating Apple's latest campaign for The Shuffle -- a small iPod without a display screen. Now "nude media" has become even more stripped down: no information as to what you're listening to. It's on its way to becoming the preferred way to listen.

Mystery Tapes is also prescient predicting the return of the single, detached from the album (sometimes articulated as the "concept" or "vision" which gave birth to it). Today we collect songs (iTunes empahasis on "10,000 songs in your pocket"), not albums: yet another act of decontextualization.

And of course it all reeks of its origins: the jukebox, which was a machine that played random singles without any articulation of what was being played (if you were far enough from the machine), without anyone to guide you through what you were hearing (unlike radio), driven by the single. In a sense The Shuffle is a return to the jukebox, no?

I would like to connect this to another phenomenon John's work predicts: impurity. One of the first things that struck me about Napster was how damn impure (read: eclectic) people's tastes were. Whilst browsing another user's files, I was stunned find John Cage MP3s snuggled up next to, say, Mariah Carey files in the same directory. Everyone has guilty pleasures, however, never before have they been so exposed.

It is interesting how the collaboration/participation discussion initially shot off into two different directions (online vs offline collaborative models) only to come back to what are essentially different appropriation methods and individual choices of crediting/presentation.

Going back to Doug and John's posts, to me 'nude media' (a great term, Kenneth, btw) is one way of talking about a history of appropriation whether it is offline or online. As John just illustrated - it is a question of choice, not medium.

That MP3 file 'stripped of its external signifiers' is essentially no different then a photocopied page separated from the author/title info. Are we not just replacing a pair of scissors (Gysin) with sound processing software? Perhaps the the main difference is in the speed with which the 'nude media' file makes it's way back into the remixing and sampling pool and how long it stays there for (and if it ever becomes used up/finished)?

And on that note, I thought Kenneth's asked some really interesting questions a few posts back, which we all seem to have skipped and I'd like to return to those:

- How does having a variety of contexts influence the cultural reception of such objects?

- Who or what determines an avant-garde artifact's value, both commercially and intellectually?

- How does this in turn impact the artist's reputation, both commercially and intellectually?

- If artifacts are always in flux, when is an historical work determined to be "finished"?

Before we get on to too many other issues, I’d like to say a few more things about nude media.

John writes: “The nude media effect isn't applicable to sound. It can be applied to any data.” His subsequent comments really say that nude media isn’t limited to sound. True enough, but I would say that idea is more than just equitably applicable to sound among other phenomena, primarily because sound has rehearsed such deracination on an historical scale through its subset of Western art music and its influence on the discourses and practices in the avant-garde, experimental and subcultural musics/sounds we’re discussing.

Phonography, whether tin foil or mp3, pops the question on a productive basis by equalizing, so to speak, all sounds, and in terms of reception by introducing seemingly inert sounds into vernacular through repetition and dissemination.

The idea of phonography from the latter-half of the 19th C., the burgeoning reality of it through the markedly audiophonic mass media of the 1920s, film and cartoon sound across the decades of the 30s and 40s, records and radio broadcasts, etc., that should have put to rest the idea in Western art music of socially unsullied sounds.

In the mid-1950s 45s and kid-kulture radio teamed up to supply enough of a vernacular base so that Buchanan and Goodman could intercut very short grabs from certain songs and have them recognized and understood. Around the same time, radio stations ran contests where even shorter, fraction-of-a-second grabs of songs were strung together, waiting to be identified.

John explored the same territory with Plexure. For any single moment in such an exercise, familiarity can be expressed through a number of identifications: if not a song, then a singer; if not a singer, then the group; if not a group, then a genre, etc. It might happen just a through a slight moment of timbre, so ambient is not immune.

Yet this is a border test; most musical listening is not subject to such extreme conditions; most moments of listening are conditioned in environments of greater tolerance to signifiication.

Furthermore, “external signifiers” (as Lina puts it), do not need tags or liner notes, they don’t need ink to dry or bits to pixelate, to exist. The only inscriptions they need are in vernacular, familiarity, memory, etc. In this way, the idea that nude media actually exists in sound is a perceptual fiction of the wolf child (even wolves have their codes). It presumes an individual’s effective isolation from cultural signification. Don't get me wrong, fictions themselves can be very productive, the "famed ephemerality of Western art music" is busy working overtime to this very day, but failure to recognize its myth is also a contributor to its inertia.

Most theories of musical listening in Western art music, Cage’s sounds-in-themselves among them, hope to make an ethic out of hearing sounds bereft of social and environmental associations. But even if they are granted some credibility and associations (and say, instruments, styles and genre are ignored for the moment) then these theories still rely on an unstated hope that other types of listening cannot exist simultaneously.

I’m reminded of Rahsaan Roland Kirk introducing a piece where he plays two melodies simultaneously. “It’s splittin’ the mind in two parts. It’s making one part of your mind say ‘oo-bla-dee,’ and making the other part of your mind say, “what does he mean?”

I would suggest that even if different listenings cannot exist simultaneously (I believe that people do in fact chew gum and walk), then they nevertheless oscillate with such rapidity, at plexurable speed, that the result is the same.